The Net Promoter Score: What It Is, and How To Use It

The incident went so horribly viral that TIME magazine wrote about it – and the fallout did not end well. Comcast ended 2014 with the distinction of being listed below Monsanto as the worst company in America. 
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So you might imagine my apprehension when, down on my luck and without enough freelance clients to support myself, I went to work for a newly-formed Comcast Xfinity call center in Fort Collins, Colorado. 

I expected a repeat of the nightmare above.

​Instead, I joined one of the best companies to work for in 2019.

Comcast – A veritable titanic of a company renowned for its “meh” service packages and its awful customer service – went from “worse than Monsanto” to one of INC.’s top 100 companies to work for in the space of just 5 years. 

TL;DR: Comcast used a 2-question survey called the Net Promoter Score. Implementing it can connect you to your constituents, empower them to speak up, and give you the community feedback you need to make big decisions. Used correctly, the NPS can revive entire communities – and, as in Comcast’s case, brand reputation.

In this blog we’re going to discuss how the NPS works, and what makes it so powerful. Then in Part 2 of this 3-part blog on community surveys, we’re going to walk you through how you can implement it. 

It takes this question: 

1. It speaks directly to the person
2. It puts emotion before numbers
3. It requires 3 different points of contact
4. It doesn’t push for more detail

First, the point is not to see if your customers talk to others about your brand: They do. Instead, this question is about how they feel. Removing the “numbers” cuts to the emotional hind-brain, so the NPS uses emoticons so people will flag how they intrinsically feel. 

The last two changes are more complex. 

The question asked in the NPS has three different options to end it, but that’s not because you’re asking them three separate questions. It’s actually three completely separate surveys.

The Net Promoter Score accounts for the differences between:

• How customers feel about the company overall and over time.
• How customers feel about individual decisions a company makes.
• How customers feel about (the representative) speaking on behalf of the company.

​Net Promoter Score doesn’t just account for customer feedback one time. It captures sentiment at multiple points along the Customer Value Journey, and it can capture the employees’ sides of the story as well. Collecting data at each of these junctures is the only way you can tease apart the complex feelings a person has about your brand or project.  

Let’s go back to the Comcast example.  

Contrary to popular belief, people are largely satisfied with Comcast’s internet services right up until the moment they’re not. People hate calling into Comcast for simple things like rebooting a modem. They dread the call, from being put on hold to actually dealing with a representative. Then, the representative they talk to has a large influence on how they feel about the company for days afterwards. Each progressive call mounts emotions on top of emotions.

A customer could get the absolute BEST customer service – but biased interactions might get in the way. If they already loathed calling in because the product broke or their service is spotty and they were expecting a nightmare call, their satisfaction rating likely won’t reflect their overall experience appropriately.

The NPS allows each customer to rate you several times, in different circumstances.  Then, it compares that customer’s response to the employee’s.  Still, it doesn’t matter how many times a person is surveyed: You’re still reducing a rich, full experience to an abstract, dry number.

So, let’s turn to the importance of that third change to the NPS question: the comment box.  

In truth, this data can be hugely helpful – if it’s used correctly.

In previous research by GetApp – “How big data is used on today’s IT teams” – the #1 recommendation for using big data to make business decisions was to implement a qualitative data system.

The NPS cleverly integrates qualitative data collection front and center without asking too much from respondents. Measuring it is another story as we’ll discuss in Part 3, but this is a solid step. 

By not asking people to elaborate on their responses, in the initial question, NPS doesn’t scare away those who otherwise wouldn’t spend a moment taking a survey. It allows people to click the emoji they identify with at the end of the interaction and move on. As a result, you get more – and more natural – responses than just the people willing to take the survey.  

At the same time however, the people who truly do have things to say have an unlimited amount of space in a defined box to say it. 

This is where companies can find the biggest, most important insights.  

This qualitative comment off the back of an email caused so much commotion that we spent 5 hours across the company discussing that Facebook post and the replies it garnered. DigitalMarketer’s email team built an entirely new email marketing deliverable out of that feedback and the company turned faulty email segmentation into one of its greatest successes.

Imagine if that person had access to a system similar to the NPS prior to his comment. Digital Marketer could have gotten that response months before hand.